Gay Place (36 page)

“You’re getting your images confused,” Neil said. “It was John Tom. He used to do his washing around here somewhere. With a tin tub and a washboard.”

Again they were silent. Stanley said: “I’ve got your speech.”

“Will I have to rewrite it?”

“No. This time I got the mixed tones licked. I wrote
two
speeches. One with all the right things in it, and one with all the wrong things. You won’t have to go through separating one from the other.”

“I’ll take both of them,” Neil said. “I may want to give the wrong one.”

At that remote hour the clear sound of young men’s voices came to them suddenly from across the campus, soft and melodic, a serenade to a sorority house.

“Oh God,” Stanley said. “I may cry … My lost youth …”

“I remember bringing Andrea out here once,” Neil said. “I showed her around and asked if she could live in one of the hutments until I finished law school.”

“What did she say?”

“She said yes — if we could run off to her family’s summer place up in the hills on weekends. So she could use the automatic washer there and have someone do the cooking.”

The singsong voices faded and then rose again, like an old radio receiver picking up a distant signal. Stanley remembered that Neil and Andrea had not really lived in one of the hutments. Stanley and John Tom had stayed on in the little room with busy wallpaper during the last two years, but Neil had won a seat in the Legislature on his second attempt, and he and Andrea were married a few months afterwards. They had honeymooned at the country place, while Andrea’s mother had come to search the better sections of the city for a suitable apartment. A carriage house next to one of those phony Norman mansions was made available when the newlyweds came down out of the hills …

Neil remembered the endless long distance telephone conversations and the weekend motorcycle trips to the summer house.

“I knew it was you,” she would say to him. “I had vibrations. I ruined a pair of stockings getting to the phone.”

“Where were you?”

“Outside — fumbling with my date and my door keys.”

“Let’s get married. It’s time we got married.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s time, and I love you.”

“You don’t really.”

“Hell yes I do.”

“Say it again.”

“Hell yes I do.”

“The other …”

“I love you.”

“That’s nice.”

“Sure it is. So let’s get married.”

“No.”

“Then live in sin with me. I can afford maybe a week of really high type sin. I’m solvent. I’ve got $500. Collected the night before election by Stanley and John Tom. I never got around to spending it.”

“Sounds like dirty money.”

“That’s the only kind there is, honey. You know that. I’ll take you to Mexico for a week.”

“No. That’s passed. That offer, as they say, was limited. You never delivered me there on time.”

“I was up for office, honey. I was campaigning.”

“Did you win?”

“Hell yes I won … Don’t you read the papers?”

“There’s no delivery out here, love. But I knew you’d call. Can you come out this weekend?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I need rescuing. There’s been a party every night. Pre-debutante parties. I’ve got to withdraw — absolutely the last group of young ladies I’m presenting to the ravages of society. Got to withdraw from this glittering world and all these faceless figures in white ties … You like that?”

“Yes.”

“It’s hard on one’s perspective spending night after night eating caviar and drinking twenty-five-year-old Ambassador.”

“I know it is, honey. It’s awful. That’s why I don’t go to debutante launchings any more. I promised myself.”

“Will you come this weekend, then? There’s a party this weekend.”

“I’ll try like hell, honey. I’ll sure try. You’ve got the right idea. It’s best to ease off these things gradually … What’s the party?”

“Artist types. Or entertaining the artist types. It’s a society we’ve organized. We encourage the muse.”

“I’m only coming to get married …”

“It’ll be a nice party. Martinis served up lukewarm in milk bottles. They’re all a pack of primitives. Neanderthals. Flanked by hairy-faced women.”

“Why don’t you come here.”

“
You’ve
got to come. I’ve got a date I can’t get out of.”

“That’s wonderful. You think the three of us will get along?”

“You don’t understand. I’ve got a date, but he won’t last the evening. He’s a heavy drinker and he always passes out early. Then you’ll be my date.”

“That sounds awfully tenuous.”

“You can count on it. I’ve never seen it fail. He collapses before ten. He’s very unhappy. He works in the family store, but he wanted to study medicine or play the violin or something …”

The party was as she described it. The sad young man was unconscious before ten o’clock; the martinis were warm and the guests were a combination of extremes — fine-limbed young people and seedy throwbacks to bohemia. The paintings were hung about like great prime slabs of beef. He moved alongside Andrea from room to room, shaking hands. She introduced him to everyone as her “Representative-Elect.” “This is my Representative-Elect,” she would say, like the queen and the prime minister. The guests smiled and nodded as if he were in the bond business or was perhaps her desperate young man who wanted to play the violin. The talk was mostly about Truman and Toynbee and Kenton, ranchstyle houses and draft laws and Howard Hughes. Those who could afford it were planning vacations in quaint, clapboard artist colonies, and those who couldn’t were already resigned to the endless weeks of working over window displays in local department stores.

Later, she had turned to him and asked if he disapproved.

He remembered saying yes, absolutely yes; that he would be willing to start a subscription campaign just to finance a special, chartered one-way flight to Provincetown. For all the others. With the understanding they wouldn’t be coming back. He made an outlandish gesture: “You don’t give a damn for all the oppressed peoples of the world.”

“Who are all these oppressed peoples?” she said.

“Millions all over. Me … right here. I’m oppressed. I want to take you off to some quiet glade and make love and talk about the success of the Berlin airlift, and this party oppresses all that.”

She smiled at him. “Get my bag and we’ll find this place.”

Outside he had said: “I don’t know any glades.”

They sat in the car, holding on to each other with the trifling medleys of some hotel dance orchestra coming from the radio. There was a period of interminable kissing during which she had got her hand inside his shirt and he was able to push the top of her dress down and touch her small breasts. He remembered the spectacular contrast of dark and light skin. Then she had sat up, touching her hair, and said: “It’s too bad.”

“About what?”

“About that glade. Now there’s no place to go but home, and my folks aren’t here this weekend and it’ll be such a disappointment you won’t get to see them …”

She had taken his hand and led him across the concrete walk between banana trees and eucalyptus plants and the Mexican tile floor in the living room and directly up the carpeted stair into a small, girl-smelling bedroom with a view of the garden and a gone-dry creek. She kissed him once, briefly, almost tragically, and began to undress. Next to him in the bed she was trembling violently, but in a moment she was giggling in his ear. “I’ve read the books,” she said, “yet I can’t remember any of it. Will you tell me what to do …” Later, still smiling with her face next to his, she laughed about not being able to say the right things. “The trouble is I really do feel different … I ache all over …” And still later, when they had slept in each other’s arms for a time, she sat up in the bed, looking like a little girl roused from an afternoon nap. “Don’t stop saying it now,” she said. “This is absolutely the Wrong Time to stop saying it.”

“Saying what?”

“That you want to get married.”

“I want to get married,” he said, but she had not heard any of it; not even her own question: she was asleep in his arms again almost immediately.

Sitting on the soft leather cushions in the cramped space of the roadster, listening to the young men’s voices from across the campus, he was able, finally, to realize his loss, to feel the great gap in himself. Not so much long gone youth as adulthood never quite attained. For all his good intentions, there had been only a kind of chic faithlessness in between, randy and frivolous. If there had once been beauty … a fever for life and a search for a code of conduct, those private joys had long since been supplanted by trivial and lighthearted depravities.

He started the engine of the little car. Stanley, sleeping next to him, held on to his glass of whiskey but did not come awake. They bounced across the football field and steered the car toward the commercial district, past darkened dormitories and gray buildings and faintly lit chapels. Moving into the center of the city he smoked the last of his cigarettes and thought about their deeply violated selves.

S
HE WAS AWAKE, SUDDENLY
, in the middle of the night, conscious of where she was and remembering why. It was not such a horror as she expected. Merciful oblivion had eluded her, but sleep brought on a condition in which she could at least attempt some kind of coming to terms. It was a curious thing, a small thing — vast hopelessness might descend again by morning, but at that moment in the middle of the night, lying in the strange room, the covers bunched up round her legs and the wet-sheep smell of mattress ticking filling her head, she could look back on the evening and see where she had been. It was not pretty to watch, but there was no compulsion to turn and run. The way she had on the day before when she had seen the small dog, very much like their own but of no particular distinction otherwise, stand trembling and terrified as an absurd, high-fendered Model-A Ford bore down. It was such a comic scene, and so protracted — the old car advancing on the dog, and the dog so clumsy and struggling like an ancient water bird grown too large in evolution for flight — that it did not seem any harm could come of it. Even at the moment when the dog ducked under the front bumper only to raise its head again and strike out at the machine passing over, and the next second with the dog tumbling along beneath the car, fighting back, furious and uncomprehending — she could not believe any violence had been visited. It was all so ridiculous and … slow motion. It was not until the dog was released from the infernal thing, dazed and bleeding and staggering toward her, gaining strength and screaming horribly and snapping at its tortured loins, that she was able to grasp what had happened and move herself toward the animal. When she reached it, remembering all the warnings from her girlhood about keeping her distance, the dog was stretched out on the sidewalk, stiff and unmoving and open-eyed. Then she had turned and run; only a few quick clumsy steps, staggering in the high heels, but it seemed she had covered half the block before she turned to look again as the old woman driver of the Model-A stood on the running board and stared from the other end of the street. Then she had walked on, steadying herself, not even breathing hard.

So now she could look back at this last accident earlier in the evening. Perhaps she could retrace her steps and try to help or at least make a prayer as the two of them expired, gasping for air.

Neil would be asking the same question. Or had he even heard the wild cry in the night? Was it all in her mind — some passioned whoop advancing out of the dark fields, ringing inside her head? Perhaps it was she, tipsy all evening and half incoherent in his arms. It doesn’t matter — Andy, my friend, you mind not mattering? My mind over matter. Irrelevant is what it is — but so awfully damned relevant is what I am and whether the signal came out of me loud and clear. Look Neil honey you just don’t pay any attention to those sound effects … But he heard, I know he heard, and he’s always been inclined to take things so serious. Oh goddam the both of us, why can’t we keep the faith?
Alas a trembling takes me
… Who said that? Who got taken by all that trembling? John Tom and his inevitable seizures: the Abominable Bookman. The both of us, shaking all over. He kept his faith one way or another. What were the lines …?
If ever any beauty
… No. That was Neil. Sweet dear Neil and our dear sweet love for one another. Like eating one’s young.
If ever any beauty I did see, which I desir’d and got, ’twas but a dream of thee
… Was there ever a love, either too much or too little, that wasn’t corrupted by sentiment? And possession? It would have to be mystical. Or worse, a mere benignancy. Philanthropists! Why can’t you charitable souls leave me alone — the both of you — and try to do it the right way for a change. By not
over
doing it, I mean. I wanted some privacy and the two of you went and overdid it. I remember being wonderfully serene and self-contained at first … but then there was so much to tell about later and you’d both gone over the hill. I told some others. Or tried to tell them as best I could, struck dumb and inarticulate, using the sign language one of you Eagle Scouts had taught me years before. I wonder if they got the message? Any of them … Any of the messages. I thought the visiting fireman had, that actor, the aging matinee idol with the changing accents: Oxford and Beacon Hill and the Virginia horse country. But he didn’t get the message. I thought he had. I got his all right.
Quite the most strenuous good time I’ve had in years … My manhood stands in salute!
Smutty postcards. He missed the point entirely. I ought to tell Neil now. He might listen, the way he was in that ancient vale miles and miles ago when I hadn’t really much to say. I could tell him now, I think I could, I’d do my best, I’ll go to him now and try …

She pulled herself from the bed and slipped on the gown she had dropped in her flight down the hall. She walked barefoot and shaking into the other room. There was only the empty bed; the sheets weren’t even warm. How quickly these enthusiasms cool and expire! She inspected all the ground-floor rooms and finally looked out the front door and saw that the roadster was gone …